from helsinki to human rights watch: how an american...

Peter Slezkine

From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch:

How an American Cold War Monitoring Group Became

an International Human Rights Institution

On September 7, 2010, George Soros gave Human Rights Watch (HRW) a $100

million grant, the largest in its history. ‘‘I’m afraid the United States has lost the moralhigh ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human RightsWatch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,’’ he said. ‘‘So to be moreeffective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less anAmerican organization.’’1

Today, it is taken for granted that HRW’s scope should be international and itsprinciples universally applicable. It seems self-evident that an organization calledHuman Rights Watch should strive to monitor abuses wherever they occur and toenforce universal standards on a global scale. It is also understood that to be mosteffective (and least vulnerable to criticism), HRW should appear to reflect the univer-sality of its principles. In its ideal form, it would operate outside the world ofparticular allegiances, origins, and ideologies; at the very least, it would embody aglobal cross-section of particular concerns.

Of course, such perfect impartiality and universal representativeness must alwaysremain elusive. A headquarters in New York and a significant percentage of Americandonors and staff risk tying HRW’s moral standing to that of the U.S. government, asSoros pointed out. And the opening of each new office, the issuing of each new report,and the acceptance of each new donation may be construed as examples of particularbiases that would undermine HRW’s declared universalism. But the prevailingassumption within the organization seems to be that time and money should help itapproach its universalist ideal. A concerted effort to diversify and denationalize theorganization’s staff, funding, and focus could eventually make defenders of rightsalmost as generic as the ‘‘humans’’ who have them, and the subjects of HRW’sadvocacy nearly as varied as the species in general.

This expectation of the future is largely based on a particular perception of thepast—one that imagines the history of Human Rights Watch as a steady progressiontoward a greater internationalization of the organization’s makeup and scope. In thewords of Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, ‘‘It was alwaysunderstood that the aim would be to go global . . . it was just a matter of graduallybuilding the organization and getting the funds.’’2 But while HRW’s expansion hasbeen fairly steady, its evolution has been far from linear. The organization today isnot a realization of an original objective, an approximation of a revealed truth, or the

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346 Humanity Winter 2014

overdue offspring of international law. It is the product of persistent attempts to defineand redefine a mission and mandate, to seek legitimacy and demonstrate neutrality,to balance particular concerns with seemingly universal principles.

HRW was founded in 1978 as the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee (HW), anorganization modeled after a domestic human rights monitoring group formed by acollection of Moscow dissidents.3 It was connected to a specific internationalagreement (the Helsinki Final Act), concerned with a particular group of victims(Eastern Bloc dissidents), and founded explicitly as a U.S. citizens’ organizationoperating on American funds (a $400,000 grant from the Ford Foundation). In whatfollows here, I will argue that HRW’s current global mandate is the result of a gradualshift away from a model of legitimacy based on country-specific committees moni-toring domestic compliance with international norms (aided, when necessary, bybetter-placed colleagues abroad) to one based on a supranational human rights regime.Throughout, the organization’s connection to the United States has been both a chal-lenge to overcome and a strength to build on. It is no accident that the U.S. HelsinkiWatch Committee, alone of the various Helsinki monitoring groups, can now layclaim to international status.

In recent years, a great deal has been written about the Helsinki Act and its contri-bution to the collapse of the Soviet Union. William Korey, Daniel Thomas, AngelaRomano, Christian Peterson, and Sarah Snyder have all made versions of this claim,although they differ in the relative influence they assign to the United States and theSoviet Union, to government officials and private citizens, to NGOs and the EuropeanCommunity.4 My own focus will be a bit different. Instead of attempting to explainhow Helsinki Watch may have influenced the Cold War, I will try to show howshifting historical circumstances and ideological commitments contributed to thecreation of a modern human rights NGO.5 This account may also serve to illustrate aphenomenon discussed more generally in Stephen Hopgood’s latest book, TheEndtimes of Human Rights, concerning the Americanization of human rights in the1970s and the U.S. origins of the modern human rights regime.6

In this essay, I will briefly look at the signing of the Helsinki Act and the formationof the Moscow Helsinki Group before moving on to the founding of Helsinki Watchand its members’ early attempts to reconcile the legitimizing framework they hadborrowed from the Moscow Helsinki Group with their own organization’s verydifferent context and aims. I then examine HW’s reaction to the election of RonaldReagan and the subsequent formation of Americas Watch and the InternationalHelsinki Federation. In the conclusion, I will look at how the collapse of the SovietUnion signaled the end of the original Helsinki Watch mandate, allowing the organi-zation to conceive of itself as a global and international NGO atop a larger networkof national human rights activists all over the world.

Because much of the HRW archive is not open to the public—access to therecords of the meetings of the board of directors, the executive committee, and thevarious subcommittees is closed until 2055 and beyond—the research presented in thisessay is preliminary. Nevertheless, the available archival documents, the organization’sannual reports, and the memoirs of some of HRW’s leading figures provide enough

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material to begin outlining some of the broader shifts in the organization’s under-standing of its mission and mandate.

The Creation of the CSCE and the Birth of the Moscow Helsinki Group

The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)—aninternational agreement promoting East-West cooperation—was signed by thirty-fivestates in Helsinki on August 1, 1975. The text established the inviolability of frontiers,territorial integrity, and nonintervention in internal affairs as basic principles ofEuropean security. But it also declared ‘‘the universal significance of human rightsand fundamental freedoms’’ and required the ‘‘participating States’’ to ‘‘fulfill theirobligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field,including inter alia the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which theymay be bound.’’7 All thirty-five signatory states agreed to meet again two years laterto review progress on the CSCE agenda.

The general consensus was that the USSR had scored a major diplomatic victory.It had achieved its goal of legitimizing its de facto control of Eastern Europe, whilemaking human rights concessions no one expected it to honor. The Politburo trium-phantly announced, ‘‘The all-European conference is the culmination of everythingpositive that has been done thus far on our continent to bring about the changeoverfrom the ‘cold war’ to detente and the genuine implementation of the principles ofpeaceful coexistence.’’8 At the time, many in the West found the Soviet celebration tobe justified. As American congressman Dante Fascell recalled in 1978, ‘‘When the longnegotiations ended at the Helsinki summit, most Western observers thought and saidthat the Soviets had gotten the best of the bargain.’’9

The Politburo was not alone in rejoicing, however. A small group of Soviet dissi-dents seized on the Final Act to advance their own cause. By the 1970s, a new traditionof legalistic dissent had grown in Moscow.10 The idea was to treat the Soviet consti-tution as if it actually mattered and to hold the government to its own laws. Whenthe full text of the Final Act appeared in the Soviet press (at the insistence of GuyCorriden, the American negotiator at Helsinki) the physicist Yuri Orlov sensed anopportunity to test this strategy in the international arena.11 On May 12, 1976, Orlov,along with ten other prominent dissidents, arrived at the apartment of AndreiSakharov, the celebrated physicist and dissident, to announce the formation of thePublic Group to Promote Fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR.12

(Sakharov himself did not join the group, but his wife, Elena Bonner, did, as anindication of his support.) The Moscow Helsinki Group, as it came to be known,declared that it would ‘‘inform the heads of all of the states that signed the Final Actof August 1, 1975, as well as the public, of cases of direct violations of the [humanrights] articles’’ of the Final Act.13 By adopting the language of human rights, theMoscow Helsinki Group helped unite different dissident movements within the USSRand gave their cause greater resonance internationally. Over the next year, similargroups were established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet republics ofUkraine, Georgia, Lithuania, and Armenia.14

It did not take long for the Soviet dissidents’ interpretation of ‘‘Helsinki’’ to finda champion in the U.S. government. Just a few days after President Ford signed the

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Final Act, Representative Millicent Fenwick (R-NJ) arrived in the Soviet Union as amember of a congressional delegation for a United States–Soviet Union Inter-Parliamentary Exchange.15 There she met Yuri Orlov, who told her that ‘‘the Westshould use the Helsinki Accords to pressure the Soviet government to honor its humanrights obligations, and monitor how well it honored them.’’16 Fenwick was soimpressed by Orlov’s arguments that she returned to Washington intent on creating agovernment commission to monitor compliance with the Final Act. Despite oppo-sition from the Ford administration, which had always been skeptical of the value ofthe human rights provisions of the Final Act (Henry Kissinger said that they could bewritten ‘‘in Swahili for all I care’’), the ‘‘U.S. Helsinki Commission’’ (as it came to beknown) was established in the fall of 1976.17

The election of Jimmy Carter a few months later elevated human rights to theguiding principle of U.S. foreign policy and brought the administration’s full backingto the CSCE. In his inaugural address on January 20, 1977, Carter promised to restorea moral order based on America’s founding ideals. Those ideals, he claimed, werebased on a respect for human rights: ‘‘Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgentcommitment to the basic principles of our Nation..’’18 This new foreign policyposition meant an increased commitment to the Helsinki process and, more specifi-cally, to the first CSCE Review Conference, scheduled to open in Belgrade on October4, 1977. In order to demonstrate the importance the new administration attached tothe conference, Carter appointed Arthur Goldberg, a former Supreme Court justice,secretary of labor, and United Nations ambassador, as head of the U.S. delegation.Acting on instructions from the president and Congress, Goldberg was outspoken andaggressive during the negotiations, going so far as to break a longstanding diplomatictaboo and ‘‘name names’’ of repressed dissidents (a tactic many of the United States’European Allies did not appreciate).19 Though the Soviets refused to make any newcommitments to human rights in Belgrade, they did agree to meet again in Madrid inNovember 1980, ensuring that the CSCE would remain an important fixture of East-West diplomacy.20

By the end of the 1970s, human rights had burst onto the international scene.They had been embraced by a U.S. government and public desperate to shake off thelegacy of Watergate and Vietnam and to reimagine America’s mission abroad; theyhad been taken up by Soviet and Eastern European dissidents eager to bring foreignattention to their cause; and, in the CSCE, they had escaped the confines of the UNand emerged as a legitimate issue in East-West relations.

The Creation of Helsinki Watch

Goldberg returned from Belgrade convinced that public pressure was needed to keephuman rights on the CSCE agenda. He had included five ‘‘public members’’ in theU.S. delegation to Belgrade and firmly believed that private citizens should play animportant role in the United States’ approach to Helsinki.21 In testimony before thegovernment Helsinki Commission, he expressed his hope that a citizens’ monitoringgroup would be established in the United States:

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Private individuals have a lot to do, outside of government. It’s a great anomalyto me that while in the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, under condi-tions of repression, private individuals have had the courage to organize privategroups but that in our country individuals have not organized a monitoring group.I would hope they would, as an indication that individuals in our country, inaddition to government, have a great interest in the implementation of the FinalAct.22

Goldberg immediately set out to correct this ‘‘anomaly’’ himself. His first step was tocontact McGeorge Bundy, the president of the Ford Foundation, who had served asnational security advisor in the Kennedy administration when Goldberg was secretaryof labor. Bundy proved receptive and suggested inviting Robert Bernstein, CEO ofRandom House and chairman of the Fund for Free Expression (a previous recipientof multiple Ford Foundation grants), to head the new monitoring group. Bernstein’sposition in the publishing world provided him with the sort of contacts that wouldhelp bring attention to the group’s activities, while his efforts to combat Sovietcensorship through the Fund for Free Expression had demonstrated his willingness tochallenge Moscow.23 Bernstein agreed to form the new monitoring committee and setabout collecting collaborators. Among those whose help he enlisted were Jeri Laber,an expert on the Soviet Union who worked closely with him at the Fund for FreeExpression; Orville Schell, former president of the New York Bar Association; EdwardKline, founder of Khronika Press, an outlet for Soviet samizdat that was partly fundedby the Ford Foundation; and Aryeh Neier, former executive director of the ACLU.On July 6, 1978, the Ford Foundation awarded the Fund for Free Expression $25,000

for a six-month planning period. In January 1979, it helped establish a U.S. HelsinkiWatch Committee with a two-year, $400,000 grant designed to carry it through thestart of the Madrid Review Conference.24

The ultimate objective of the newly established Helsinki Watch was to applypressure to the Soviet Union through the human rights provisions of the Final Act.As Alfred Friendly Jr., former deputy staff director of the U.S. government HelsinkiCommission and member of a short-lived HW subcommittee (the Committee onHuman Rights and Fundamental Freedoms), wrote to Donald Fraser, a former U.S.congressman and chairman of the same subcommittee, ‘‘The U.S. Watch would notexist . . . if it were not for dissatisfaction in America with the civil and human rightsrecord of the USSR and some of its allies.’’25 HW’s purpose, as he put it (presumablyquoting Fraser’s original formulation), was to make ‘‘the other fellow ‘look bad or dogood.’ ’’26 In order to accomplish this objective, the organization would conduct itsown research on potential violations, pressure the U.S. government to maintain itsfocus on ‘‘Helsinki,’’ and contribute to a ‘‘consciousness-raising’’ effort both at homeand abroad, ‘‘so that the U.S. delegation to Madrid may not feel as isolated in itshuman rights stand as did the U.S. delegation to Belgrade.’’27

But Helsinki Watch was not simply a private extension of the U.S. government’sefforts to target the Soviet Union at the CSCE Review Conference. In its structureand designation it was a domestic monitoring group along the lines of those founded

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in the USSR and Eastern Europe a few years earlier. According to HW’s first twoannual reports, ‘‘The U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee [was] both a culmination ofJustice Goldberg’s initiative and a response to the first published document issued bythe Moscow Helsinki Watch Group which called for the formation of private moni-toring committees in each of the Helsinki signatory states.’’28 Robert Bernstein createdHW in 1978 (two years after the Moscow Helsinki Group had issued its call) becauseArthur Goldberg, the head of the U.S. delegation to Belgrade, had decided that privatecitizens had an important role to play in the United States’ approach to Helsinki (andin its confrontation with the Soviet Union). But it was Yuri Orlov and his fellowdissidents who had turned Helsinki into the main battleground in the fight againstthe Soviet state and made citizens’ monitoring committees an important weapon. Inhis letter to Fraser, Friendly addressed the unexpected legacy of the Final Act:

Since 1976—and especially in America—the Helsinki Accord has come to be seenas an innovative international commitment that Western concepts of human rightsand civil liberties must and can figure prominently in the foundation of lastingpeace. The obvious fact that the Soviet Union does not share this perception doesnot invalidate the view or its pursuit. The less obvious fact that the perception wasinitially popularized by East-bloc dissenters (the Soviet Helsinki watchers, first ofall) provides citizens’ groups in other countries a special role in the long processof making the concept a reality.29

In 1978–79, the precise nature of HW’s ‘‘special role’’ was still unclear. Helsinki Watchtook great pains to emphasize its connection to an existing network of Helsinki moni-toring committees and to stress its commitment to the dissidents who had created it.According to the organization itself, HW had been founded as ‘‘a direct response tothe appeal of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group urging creation of such groups inother countries,’’ as ‘‘a gesture of moral support for the activities of the beleagueredHelsinki monitors in the Soviet bloc,’’ and as an indication of ‘‘respect for the workof the brave men and women who organized the first such group in Moscow in 1976

and those who carry on the work of promoting observance with the Accords in eachof the signatory states.’’30 But the precedent set by the Moscow Helsinki Group (andfollowed by each of the subsequently formed monitoring groups elsewhere in theUSSR and Eastern Europe) presented certain difficulties for a U.S. Helsinki Watch.The Moscow Group formulated its purpose in patriotic and legalistic terms, officiallydesignating itself the Public Group to Promote Fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords inthe USSR. Although the group’s actual purpose was to turn the Helsinki Act againstthe state by publicizing Soviet violations abroad, its founding fiction was that it soughtto cooperate with its government in implementing Helsinki at home. The trans-parency of this fiction (and the inevitability of an aggressive state reaction) did notlessen the group’s importance. By adopting the language of human rights and focusingon the text of the Final Act, the Moscow Group was appealing to theoreticallyuniversal norms the Soviet Union had publicly accepted and referring to an interna-tional agreement whose signing it had proclaimed a great triumph.

HW could follow this path only partway. By patterning their organization after theHelsinki monitoring committees in the USSR and Eastern Europe, HW’s founders

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sought to maintain the fiction created by the Moscow Helsinki Group. They would joina network of private citizens, now covering both East and West, whose stated purposewas to ensure government compliance with internationally accepted norms. In fact, oneof HW’s first serious undertakings was to organize a joint press conference with theMoscow Helsinki Group designed to demonstrate a unity of purpose.31 But Orlov’sfiction was not a perfect fit for the newly formed Helsinki Watch. By borrowing theform used to legitimize the activity of the existing Eastern Bloc Helsinki groups, HWleft itself with an uncertain function. It was a citizens’ group allied with its state, set upaccording to a model meant to justify opposition to the state. HW’s status as a nationalmonitoring committee, nominally analogous to its sister organizations in Eastern Europeand the USSR, conflicted with its goal of monitoring Helsinki compliance in the EasternBloc. This ambiguity of purpose is evident in a letter from David Heaps (then aconsultant with the Ford Foundation) to Jeri Laber a few months after the organization’sfounding: ‘‘The issue of the geographical focus or foci of the program seems to beuncertain. What should be the balance or relative emphasis on conditions in the UnitedStates and in other signatory nations?’’32

HW’s founders struggled to come up with a consistent answer to this question.The U.S. Helsinki Watch, they decided, would seek ‘‘to monitor domestic and inter-national compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act.’’33 Itwould attempt to fulfill its obligations as a national monitoring group while simulta-neously pursuing its international objectives. But the ‘‘relative emphasis’’ on domesticand international compliance still had to be resolved, and both aspects of the organiza-tion’s mixed mandate required justification. How would HW explain, both to itselfand to the American public, the need for monitoring the country’s compliance withthe Final Act? And how would it engage in international monitoring without under-mining its claim to be following in the footsteps of the Moscow Helsinki Group?

Some of HW’s early contributors argued that the group’s primary focus should beits domestic monitoring. By taking the Moscow Group’s fiction seriously and repro-ducing it at home, HW could realize its international goals indirectly. It would showsupport for its sister groups in the USSR and Eastern Europe, while demonstratinghow a citizens’ monitoring committee could function in an open and democraticsociety. The contrast between HW’s role in the United States and the repression ofthe Helsinki monitors in the Eastern Bloc would serve as an indirect indictment ofthe USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies. According to the group’s original proposal tothe Ford Foundation:

Soviet spokesmen are continually accusing the United States of meddling in theinternal human rights problems of other countries while disregarding our ownhuman rights abuses at home. A U.S. monitoring group such as the one weenvisage would not only provide an outlet for discussion in this country but alsohelp counter such arguments. It would illustrate to the world that a free societyallows private groups to investigate, report and criticize shortcomings and that themembers of such groups need not be afraid of punishment or recrimination.34

In his letter to Fraser, written nearly a year later, Friendly continued this line ofargument, suggesting that HW should ‘‘work with a built-in dualism of purpose,

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addressing U.S. compliance when its instincts dictate the pursuit of violation in theSoviet Union and East Europe.’’35 According to Friendly,

The enduring problem of the Watch is to reconcile its identity as an Americancitizens’ pressure group with its goal of promoting international compliance withstandards Americans honor and others dispute. It must be seen to be doing aserious job on its own turf and not appear an adjunct of government in order tofollow the example set by the Soviet Helsinki monitors. Remembering howgradual the whole process is bound to be, the Watch can nevertheless have aninfluence itself and show others how to do likewise.36

This approach put a premium on HW’s symbolic effect. If it was seen monitoringdomestic compliance and appeared impartial, its influence could extend beyond theborders of the United States. Marvin Frankel, a member of HW’s board of directors,seemed to favor such a strategy. In his response to Friendly’s memorandum, hestressed that groups such as HW should ‘‘demonstrate that they have used Helsinkipositively and show ways in which they have furthered Helsinki goals in their owncountries.’’37

This line of argument was evident in HW’s first two annual reports. Thoughmembers of Helsinki Watch may have privately believed that their goal was topromote compliance with ‘‘standards Americans honor and others dispute,’’ HW’sfirst two annual reports stated that ‘‘the internationally-sanctioned principlesembodied in the Helsinki Accords [could] serve as significant standards for theimprovement of the United States’ human rights record.’’38 By 1980, HW hadcollected reports on a variety of domestic issues, such as free speech, freedom ofreligion, racial discrimination, Native American rights, sex discrimination, visa andrefugee policy, prisoners’ rights, mental health, and migratory labor, and wasconvincing enough in monitoring ‘‘its own turf ’’ that it was forced to defend itselfagainst accusations of trivializing Soviet violations. One commentator, Stephen Whit-field, even wrote in a letter to the New York Times that an American citizens’ groupmonitoring the country’s compliance with the Helsinki Act ‘‘must baffle Soviet dissi-dents and cheer their tormentors.’’39 A U.S. organization seemingly set up to performthe same functions as dissident monitoring groups in Eastern Europe suggested anequivalence that could be interpreted as counterproductive or unpatriotic.

Of course, HW’s founders did not believe in a real equivalence between theUnited States and the USSR. They were no less proud of America’s human rightsrecord than those who were attacking them for monitoring it. As Laber recalled,‘‘There was a feeling at that time that we were so superior, in terms of human rightscompliance, to the Soviet Union and the other East European countries.’’40 But HWstressed the symbolic importance of demonstrating this superiority through domesticmonitoring:

The commissioning of these reports in no way implied an equation betweenhuman rights practices in the United States and the egregious violations that existin the USSR and certain Eastern European signatories. It was an affirmation ofthe tradition of independent political activism in the United States, of the Helsinkiprinciple that citizens everywhere should ‘‘know and act upon their rights.’’41

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HW argued that the group’s ‘‘very existence’’ would ‘‘emphasize the importance the[United States] attaches to Helsinki principles,’’ and that ‘‘despite enormous dispar-ities between human rights practices in the United States and in the USSR, theposition taken by the Moscow Helsinki Group is equally valid for U.S. citizens:private citizens must assume responsibility for safeguarding their own rights.’’42

In its first year, Helsinki Watch worked hard to demonstrate that the MoscowGroup’s position was ‘‘equally valid’’ in the United States, but its members’ mainfocus was safeguarding others’ rights, not their own. As Aryeh Neier writes in hismemoir, ‘‘[Bob Bernstein’s] purpose in establishing Helsinki Watch was to protestrepression against dissenters in the Soviet Union’’ (and, by extension, elsewhere in theEastern Bloc).43 With the exception of Neier, most of HW’s founders shared aconnection to the USSR. Jeri Laber had studied at the Russian Institute at Columbiaand had worked as the foreign editor of the Current Digest of the Soviet Press; OrvilleSchell’s human rights consciousness ‘‘had been raised when he visited the SovietUnion on behalf of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews’’; and Edward Kline had‘‘for many years funded the publication of Soviet samizdat in English translation.’’44

The fact that they had explicitly based their watch committee on the Moscow HelsinkiGroup’s model led them to stress the importance of HW’s domestic efforts, but theirlongstanding interest in the fate of the Moscow Group’s creators compelled them todevote ever more energy to HW’s international monitoring. In fact, David Fishlow,HW’s first executive director and a former colleague of Neier’s at the ACLU, wasforced out after only four months on the job, once it became clear that his civil rightsbackground and domestic focus would conflict with the organization’s internationalobjectives.45 In HW’s second annual report, the section titled ‘‘Domestic Compliance’’was listed after ‘‘The USSR and Eastern Europe’’ and occupied one third of the space,although the passages about the applicability of the Moscow model in the UnitedStates and the symbolic importance of domestic monitoring remained.46

In a New York Times op-ed, published on March 7, 1979, Bernstein and Schellargued that the group’s domestic reports justified its foreign focus: ‘‘We will monitorU.S. compliance, in the belief that by holding ourselves accountable in an open andforthright manner we earn the right to hold others accountable as well.’’47 But theexact extent of the ‘‘others’’ covered by this right was an issue the early HW had yetto definitively resolve. From the start, the language of human rights implied a poten-tially global scope. In addressing the Democratic Platform Committee as arepresentative of Helsinki Watch in 1980, Goldberg claimed that ‘‘what we all share isa faithful commitment to human rights both in this country and throughout theworld.’’48 But while this may have been true of HW’s individual members, many ofwhom had contributed to Amnesty International and other human rights groups sincethe early 1970s, it could not describe the activity of the organization itself, which wasbound by the text of the Helsinki Final Act and the framework of the CSCE reviewconferences.49

In the same op-ed, Bernstein and Schell identified the scope of HW’s mandatewith the geographical limits of the Helsinki Accords: ‘‘The purpose of our committee. . . is to document and publicize violations in all the countries that signed theHelsinki accords,’’ and in an early internal report, Edward Kline listed examples of

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alleged Helsinki violations for HW to consider from all over Europe and NorthAmerica, ranging from the ‘‘imprisonment and extrajudicial persecution of Charter77 signatories in Czechoslovakia’’ to ‘‘British treatment of political detainees inUlster’’; from the ‘‘denial of the right of emigration of Germans, Jews and others inthe USSR’’ to ‘‘censorship in Spain.’’50 But, in the end, Helsinki Watch had neitherthe resources nor the inclination to monitor all thirty-five signatory states. Moreover,a U.S. watch committee that claimed the right to monitor Helsinki compliance every-where undermined the ideal of a network of national committees, each made up ofprivate citizens assuming responsibility for safeguarding their own rights.

It was the collapse of this network, inasmuch as it ever existed, that formed thebasis for perhaps the most successful of HW’s justifications for its international moni-toring. Helsinki Watch derived a great part of its legitimacy from its connection to alarger citizens’ movement and in its early months made plans to cooperate with otherHelsinki monitoring groups in a joint pursuit of shared objectives. In a letterannouncing its formation to existing Helsinki monitoring committees in the USSRand Eastern Europe, HW declared its intention to ‘‘monitor implementation of theFinal Act both in the United States and, by working with other citizens’ groups, inother countries which have signed the Accords.’’51 But by 1979, many of the originalHelsinki monitors had been imprisoned or exiled.52 Instead of cooperating withcolleagues abroad, HW spent most of its time defending them (of the nine subsectionsunder the heading ‘‘Eastern Europe and the USSR’’ in HW’s first annual report, eightdealt directly with the repression of Eastern Bloc dissidents). Helsinki Watch justifiedthis approach by appealing to the Helsinki ‘‘right of the individual to know and actupon his rights.’’53 Where Helsinki monitors were prevented from acting on theirrights, HW would act on their behalf. The organization’s mission was thus formulatedas the ‘‘process of monitoring U.S. compliance with the human rights provisions ofthe Helsinki Accords and of monitoring the freedom of others to do the same in theirown countries.’’54 Arthur Goldberg emphasized the special relationship between HWand the Eastern Bloc dissidents in his 1980 testimony to the Democratic PlatformCommittee:

The U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee feels a special responsibility toward its coun-terparts in the Eastern bloc signatory states: the members of the various HelsinkiWatch Groups in the Soviet Union, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, KOR inPoland, and others. So many of them today are in prison, labor camp, and exilefor meeting and speaking out on human rights issues, activities we take forgranted. The fate of these individuals and of the principles they espouse are secureonly to the extent to which we—American citizens and the Americangovernment—speak up for them and reassert their right to ‘‘know and act’’ upontheir rights.55

In its first few years, Helsinki Watch faced numerous financial, administrative,and organizational problems that it had to address if it hoped to remain relevant, evenin the short term. But these obstacles were not simply a collection of hurdles toovercome on the way to a predetermined finish line. Questions of legitimacy,

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mandate, and mission had to be (at least partially) resolved before it could be deter-mined in which direction the race was to be run. And the precise orientation of theearly HW was far from clear. On the one hand, it was a paternalist attempt, in closealliance with the U.S. government, to ‘‘speak up’’ for the victims of communistoppression in the name of the human rights that Americans took ‘‘for granted’’ andidentified with their own country’s founding ideals. On the other, it was a reaction tothe model established by the founding fathers of the Helsinki movement inMoscow—a source of legitimacy that did not translate smoothly to the Americancontext. HW’s attempts to navigate these tensions did much to determine thedirection of its initial evolution. Its further growth would depend on how it reinter-preted its role in the face of changing geopolitical circumstances.

From Carter to Reagan: Helsinki Watch Transformed

During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a general alliance between Helsinki Watch and theU.S. government (‘‘we—American citizens and the American government’’) wasassumed. In his inaugural address Carter proclaimed that the United States’‘‘commitment to human rights must be absolute.’’56 In doing so, he identifiedAmerican interests with what, in theory at least, were universally accepted values. TheUnited States would stand not for a particular ideology or system of government, butfor the global good: ‘‘We will fight our wars against poverty, ignorance, andinjustice—for those are the enemies against which our forces can be honorablymarshaled.’’57 The USSR, America’s geopolitical antagonist, was never mentioned.The closest Carter came to expressing the United States’ Cold War allegiances was tosay that ‘‘our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for these societies which sharewith us an abiding respect for individual human rights.’’58 Defined in this way,America’s preferences were no different from those publicly professed by the USSR,which, in signing the Final Act, had recognized ‘‘the universal significance of humanrights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace,justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations andco-operation among . . . all States.’’59

For Carter, however, this apparent agreement did not imply a moral equivalencebetween the United States and the USSR. The fact that human rights held ‘‘universalsignificance’’ did not mean that they were respected everywhere in equal measure, orthat some were not more qualified to promote them than others. Human rights,though theoretically universal, were at the same time essentially American, and it wasthe responsibility of the United States to promote them worldwide: ‘‘there can be nonobler nor more ambitious task for America to undertake on this day of a newbeginning than to help shape a just and peaceful world that is truly humane.’’60 Butbecause Carter expressed America’s task in terms of universal human rights, the ColdWar divide could be bridged by the illusion of common ground. At least on paper,the United States and the USSR subscribed to some of the same basic principles. Itjust so happened that America’s particular political tradition made it better suited toabide by them.

Helsinki Watch was designed to function within this ideological framework. Itproceeded from the premise that human rights were universally accepted and that the

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Helsinki principles applied equally to all the signatory states. This presumption ofshared values was key to HW’s image of impartiality. Though its mandate was ulti-mately quite different from that of the Moscow Helsinki Group, HW emphasized thebond between the two organizations. It was important to show that citizens from theUnited States and the USSR were motivated by the same basic concerns. The fact thatthese concerns mostly mirrored U.S. government policy was not perceived as a majorproblem. HW would follow the Moscow precedent by monitoring domesticcompliance with the Final Act (or at least appearing to do so), but ultimately HWthought of the government as an ally, not as an antagonist. It was taken for grantedthat the promotion of human rights was in the interest of the United States—of‘‘American citizens and the American government’’ alike. As Carter said in his inau-gural address, it was America’s ‘‘special obligation to take on those moral duties which,when assumed, seem invariably to be in [its] own best interests.’’61 As Jeri Laber recalls,‘‘We were creating a ‘new’ ideology from precepts we believed had long beenforgotten—a belief in the essential dignity of the human being, as defined in our owncountry’s founding documents.’’62

The election of Ronald Reagan put an abrupt end to the alliance between HelsinkiWatch and the U.S. government. When he entered office in January 1981, Reaganimmediately redefined the terms of the Cold War. As Laber recalls, ‘‘ ‘Democracy’became the key word in Reagan’s rhetoric, intended to replace ‘human rights.’ ’’63

Reagan’s America would stand for a particular political system, not a universalmorality derived from a presumed global consensus. Reagan thus rejected any notionof a Cold War common ground based on shared values. The Soviet Union, heclaimed, followed a separate set of principles dictated by the logic of communism: ‘‘asgood Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that theonly morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is worldrevolution.’’64 In Reagan’s rhetoric, the Soviets were not hypocrites, failing to live upto global human rights standards, but principled (and ‘‘evil’’) opponents, single-mindedly pursuing their communist objectives. American values may have expresseda universal truth, but they were not universally shared or understood.

This reformulation of U.S. policy undermined the model of legitimacy that HWhad adapted from the Moscow Helsinki Group. Yuri Orlov and his companions hadseized on the Helsinki human rights provisions as a means of universalizing their own(and their compatriots’) particular struggles, defining the wrongs that they hadsuffered in a way that theoretically placed them under international (read Western)jurisdiction. Bernstein and company responded to this appeal by aiming the sameinstrument in the opposite direction, using Helsinki and human rights to descendfrom universal values to particular victims (though this reversal required a number ofawkward recalibrations). Reagan’s election and renewed emphasis on the Cold Wardivide threatened to rupture this relationship. The organization’s reaction to thesudden vulnerability of its universalist justifications was to demonstrate that they were,in fact, its guiding principles. If before, human rights had been a weapon in thedefense of the Eastern European dissidents, they would now become a casus belli intheir own right. And Reagan, for attempting to redefine the terms of the struggle,would become the organization’s key opponent.

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In order to defend its legitimacy and prove the authenticity of its principles, HWdecided to launch an attack on the Reagan administration’s strategic alliances withright-wing governments in Latin America. Since American aid had been legally tiedto human rights performance, Reagan was forced to deny or underreport abusescommitted by these regimes. By drawing attention to such misrepresentations, theorganization could demonstrate its Cold War neutrality and achieve a balance itsdomestic Helsinki monitoring could never provide. To do this, the organization’sboard established an Americas Watch (AW) as a complement to the original HelsinkiWatch, ‘‘to promote human rights throughout the Americas’’ and protest againstWashington’s foreign policy.65 As Jeri Laber recalled, ‘‘I liked the idea of enlarging ourscope to the non-Communist world: It would underscore the fact that we were neitherright nor left in our orientation but solely concerned with protesting human rightsabuses—wherever they occurred.’’66 In its first annual report, Americas Watchexplained its formation as an attempt to demonstrate the evenhandedness of itsapproach in response to Reagan’s foreign policy:

[The policy of the Reagan administration] caused the Helsinki Watch—an organi-zation that focuses primarily on abuses of human rights in countries labeled hostileand totalitarian—to take steps to ensure that its own work should not be seen tobe merely a tactic for belaboring the Soviet Union and its allies. That perceptionwould not be helpful to human rights activists in those countries. Abuses ofhuman rights must be opposed equally and evenhandedly, in the view of theHelsinki Watch, whether committed by nations that are hostile, neutral or friendlyor by governments that are totalitarian, authoritarian or democratic. To practicewhat it preaches, the Helsinki Watch organized the Americas Watch as aCommittee of the Fund for Free Expression. The Fund is also the parent of theHelsinki Watch.67

In order to deal with a world divided in two, HW’s leaders created a two-part organi-zation. AW would monitor human rights violations in authoritarian countries alliedwith the United States, while HW continued to monitor the totalitarian states of theCSCE. Helsinki Watch would retain its original mandate, but the organization as awhole would stand for human rights beyond Helsinki.68

This shift away from the Helsinki process toward a broader human rights mandatewas largely driven by Aryeh Neier. Neier had been involved with Helsinki Watchsince its founding and was a member of HW’s Executive Committee, but it was onlyafter Reagan’s election that he came to work at the organization full time. Unlikemost of the other founding members of Helsinki Watch, Neier had no priorconnection to Eastern Europe and the dissident movement. As the former executivedirector of the ACLU, he was more comfortable protesting the actions of his owngovernment than the Helsinki violations of the USSR and its allies. The establishmentof Americas Watch, aided by his existing contacts in the Latin American human rightsmovement, struck him as a natural response to the Reagan administration’s Cold Warpolicies:

Adding a focus on Latin America seemed obvious to us at the time. It was theregion where the new administration seemed intent on demonstrating that its

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stand on human rights would differ sharply from the outgoing Carter administra-tion’s policies. If we wanted to have an impact on human rights policy, we had toestablish a capacity to work on Latin America.69

The organization’s geographical expansion was eventually followed by a parallelexpansion in its definition of human rights. In the early 1980s, civil wars were beingfought between U.S.-backed military governments and leftist rebel groups in ElSalvador and Guatemala, and between the leftist Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed right-wing Contras in Nicaragua—three countries covered by the newly estab-lished Americas Watch. But human rights, as defined in international documents suchas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civiland Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social andCultural Rights, provided no basis for monitoring these conflicts. At the time, human-itarian law, which encompassed the Geneva and Hague Conventions and governedmilitary conduct (the ‘‘laws of war’’), formed a tradition distinct from human rightsand had given rise to its own private organizations, most notably the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross. In an effort to provide legal justification for AW’smonitoring in Central America, Neier decided to incorporate humanitarian law intothe organization’s mandate:

The declarations, agreements, and treaties that make up international humanrights law and that are the standards relied upon by Amnesty International and allother groups that monitor human rights do not provide grounds for assessingmany of the most abusive practices in military conflicts. I wanted a basis in inter-national law to denounce indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations,disproportionate bombardments of population centers, forced displacement, anda host of other means by which the opposing sides in the wars then under way inEl Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua sought to prevail.70

An added emphasis on humanitarian law allowed AW to assess the ‘‘abusive practices’’of the Central American civil wars. It also allowed AW to hold nonstate actors (whowere not subject to international human rights law) to the same standard as govern-ments. By expanding its definition of human rights to include humanitarian law, AWwas able to justify monitoring rebel groups as well as governments. This allowedAmericas Watch to pursue the twin objectives that had prompted its creation: todemonstrate that it favored neither the ‘‘left’’ nor the ‘‘right’’ and to provide ammu-nition for the organization’s campaign against Reagan’s human rights policies (aneffort greatly aided by AW’s ability to monitor the U.S.-backed Contras).

While AW monitored the civil wars in Central America, it was engaged in aconflict of its own in the United States. According to Neier, ‘‘Washington was theprincipal battleground for the newly established Americas Watch.’’71 AW devotedmuch of its time to lobbying the U.S. government and eventually opened a permanentoffice in Washington, DC. It used information gathered through its monitoring workto challenge the Reagan administration’s policy of supporting right-wing governmentsand rebel groups in Central and South America. AW’s reports, by themselves, hadlittle effect on the human rights situation in the countries they covered, but the organi-zation’s relentless shaming of the Reagan administration prompted the U.S.

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government to apply some pressure of its own.72 Although AW could not hope toinfluence the Reagan administration’s choice of which governments to support, itcould have some effect on what behavior the United States demanded in return.According to Neier:

Human Rights Watch’s rise to international eminence derived in part from its roleas an organization based in the United States that exercised influence over U.S.policy. We exploited the power of the United States around the world to promoteour own agenda. What made our efforts effective was our insistence on holdingthe United States accountable for abuses by governments of other countries thatheld power because of U.S. support. Though U.S. officials were not the authorsof those abuses, in circumstances where the United States acted as an apologist fortorture, disappearances, or murder, we treated our government, as noted, as a‘‘surrogate villain.’’73

For the watch committees, the U.S. government proved far more useful as an antag-onist than as an ally. Helsinki Watch could attempt to demonstrate ‘‘that individualsin [the United States], in addition to government, have a great interest in the imple-mentation of the Final Act,’’ but the organization had little discernible influence onthe Soviet government and could only hope to fine-tune a Washington policy that, inessence, it already shared. Americas Watch, on the other hand, could potentially wieldmuch greater power by providing a principled and persistent lobby against Reagan’sforeign policy. By transcending Helsinki, the organization was finally able to becomean effective monitoring committee domestically (though in a way that differed fromthe Moscow model).

In breaking from Helsinki and focusing on its own government’s human rightspolicies, Americas Watch was able to effect immediate change in a way that its seniorsibling could not. While AW waged its war against Reagan, Helsinki Watch persistedin its steady contest with the Soviet Union. It continued to issue reports on Helsinkicompliance (both domestically and in Eastern Europe and the USSR) and kept aspotlight on the fate of the Eastern Bloc dissidents and imprisoned Helsinki monitors.But by 1982, the Second CSCE Follow-up Meeting in Madrid had been in session fortwo years without producing a concluding document. As HW noted in its thirdannual report, ‘‘To many it seems as if the Madrid conference may become apermanent institution.’’74 At times, Jeri Laber worried ‘‘that Helsinki Watch would beeclipsed by its new sister.’’75 She recalls that HW’s members ‘‘were getting tired ofhearing the same old unchanging stories of Soviet repression.’’76 The same seemedtrue of the Soviets themselves. HW’s anticommunist credentials had proven useful inAW’s confrontation with Reagan, but the establishment of Americas Watch had donelittle to improve HW’s standing vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.77 The organization’s NewYork address left it vulnerable to accusations of bias, regardless of the left-right balancedisplayed by its two watch committees.

In an attempt to minimize HW’s American profile and to re-energize the Helsinkiside of the organization’s operations, Neier resurrected the idea of an internationalnetwork of Helsinki monitoring committees. This time, Western European humanrights groups would take the place of their Eastern European predecessors. Laber

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recalls Neier’s initial suggestion: ‘‘I think we should form an association with groupsin Western Europe, in countries that have more leverage with the USSR than theUnited States now has. We should find out what groups are in existence and want towork with us. Where they don’t exist, we should create them.’’78 Between Februaryand June 1982, Neier and Laber crisscrossed Western Europe in search of potentialmembers for the proposed umbrella organization.79 When the International HelsinkiFederation for Human Rights (IHF) was finally established on September 9, 1982, itcomprised a total of eight national committees, representing Austria, Belgium,Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.80 HW’srecruitment efforts were not entirely successful, however. As Laber writes, ‘‘Therewere now eight national groups in the West, on paper at least. Four of them weremerely one-person operations, but we didn’t advertise that fact.’’81

In its 1982 annual report, HW claimed that ‘‘while the U.S. Helsinki WatchCommittee has acted as a catalyst in this project, it has not imposed its own modelupon the other groups.’’82 This point needed to be emphasized because the nationalcommittees were supposed to be acting in accordance with the Helsinki spirit, notAmerican values. IHF’s official mandate, however, corresponded closely to HW’s own.Press releases announcing the formation of the IHF stated that the committees would‘‘have a broad mandate enabling them to investigate violations within their own coun-tries and elsewhere,’’ and that the IHF’s purpose was ‘‘above all to demand thatcitizens monitoring compliance with the Helsinki agreement must be freed fromprison if the Helsinki process is to continue meaningfully.’’83

The IHF was an attempt to legitimize Helsinki Watch by creating WesternEuropean groups that could function as allies within a network of national Helsinkicitizens’ committees. Helsinki Watch could not be accused of spreading Americanvalues if its aims were shared by the French, Belgians, and others. According to HW’s1982 annual report, the IHF would ‘‘demonstrate that concern for human rights isneither ephemeral nor a peculiarity of the United States and will reaffirm the faith ofthose in Eastern Europe whose lives are now being spent in prison and exile becausethey attempted to defend Helsinki principles.’’84 And since, in its founding document,the Moscow Helsinki Group had called on the citizens of the other signatory states toform their own monitoring committees and expressed a hope that ‘‘in the future, anappropriate international committee [would be] formed,’’ the IHF could be framedas a response to the Moscow group’s original call.85

The IHF established an International Secretariat in Vienna and acquired its ownstaff and executive director, but it was permanently underfunded and never becamefully independent of HW. Though it theoretically stood above HW, it often lookedto New York for leadership, especially in its early years. According to Jeri Laber,

The Vienna staff lacked experience and needed guidance on a daily basis. Theyturned to me, across the ocean, for advice. I found myself spending many hourson the phone with Vienna—helping to compile mailing lists, editing newsletters,planning meetings, drafting agendas, providing background materials, and, all toooften, settling tearful disputes. The staff even asked me for permission to close theoffice on an Austrian national holiday.86

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The IHF eventually acquired a bit more independence and transformed itself into aneffective European human rights instrument in later years, but it never fully subsumedHW into its federation of equal national committees (and was officially declaredbankrupt in 2007, after its financial manager ‘‘confessed to having embezzled a largeamount of money over several years’’).87 In the end, it was the various U.S. watchcommittees, not the different national Helsinki committees, that would come togetherto form one of the world’s premier international human rights NGOs.

Of HW’s two responses to Reagan’s revolution in foreign policy, one proved farmore productive than the other. The attempt, on the Helsinki side, to demonstratethe group’s impartiality by placing it within a larger international movement was onlyslightly more successful than similar efforts at the time of the organization’s founding.The Helsinki monitoring model did a poor job of distinguishing between nationalmovements that invited foreign interference and those that primarily sought toprovide it. It also failed to account for the national committees’ varying ability toinfluence great-power behavior. The creation of Americas Watch, on the other hand,signaled the start of a far more successful long-term strategy. By extending its mandatebeyond Helsinki, the organization transformed its American connection from apotential limit on its international ambitions into the foundation of its future growth.By focusing on the human rights violations of America’s allies, as opposed to theHelsinki violations of its Cold War enemies, AW was able to shift the organization’sattentions from Moscow to Washington, DC, where it had a much easier time influ-encing policy. And since AW did not derive its legitimacy from membership in aninternational network, it was not held back by the need to feign equality with othermonitoring committees.

Another consequence of establishing Americas Watch was to set the organizationon a path of limitless expansion. By separating human rights from the Helsinkiframework, it cut the tether that had previously limited its scope. Instead of adaptingits model of legitimacy to justify its interest in the fates of specific individuals, theorganization began to choose its subjects to fit the principles it professed. In order todemonstrate its impartiality, the organization expanded its geographical coverage andlegal base to include abuses committed by the left and right, during war and peace,by government and rebel forces. Since there were no natural boundaries to containthis search for balance, the organization’s scope continued to grow. According toLaber, ‘‘Once Americas Watch became established, it just seemed natural to try to goon and deal with other parts of the world as well.’’88 The organization as a whole hadcome to stand for human rights in general, and by the end of the 1980s, it covered theentire globe. As Neier writes, ‘‘We established Asia Watch in 1985, Africa Watch in1988, and the last of the regional Watch Committees, Middle East Watch, in 1989.With that, there were no longer any geographical limits on our capacity, so we startedusing the name Human Rights Watch to establish our identity as an organization withglobal reach.’’89

The Abandonment of the Helsinki Monitoring Model

By the late 1980s, Human Rights Watch had become a global organization dedicatedto defending human rights around the world, but its mandate was not uniform. The

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regional committee responsible for Europe remained peculiar. Helsinki Watch, as itwas still called, retained a number of commitments that the other watch committees,established according to a simplified version of its mandate, did not have. Itsgeographical scope was defined by the extent of the Final Act; its activities continuedto revolve around the CSCE review conferences; and its relationship to the EasternEuropean dissidents, and the Moscow Helsinki Group in particular, remained centralto its self-perception. HW’s 1988 annual report (and nearly all those that had precededit) emphasized the organization’s connection to the Moscow group and the impor-tance of the precedent it had set: ‘‘We were following in the footsteps of the pioneergroup of Moscow Helsinki monitors that included Elena Bonner Sakharov, NatanSharansky, Yuri Orlov, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Anatoly Marchenko and SergeiKovalyov.’’90 But the Moscow Helsinki Group was much more than a template forthe U.S. watch committee. The individuals listed, as well as their counterparts in otherEastern European countries, such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik, acquired aspecial aura of their own. Their names were recited endlessly, both as the Helsinkimovement’s pioneers and as its principal martyrs. They were the focus of HW’s workand the justification for its international monitoring. By the end of the 1980s, theorganization’s mandate may have grown to encompass all humans, but HRW’sHelsinki Watch division continued to feel ‘‘a special responsibility toward its counter-parts in the Eastern bloc signatory states.’’

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War transformed thisrelationship. The organization’s original antagonist had fallen, and the dissidents whohad inspired HW’s formation had escaped repression and, in some cases, entered thenew governments. Rachel Denber, who had recently been hired as the first director ofHRW’s Moscow office, thought ‘‘for about thirty seconds, that maybe everything wason the right course in Russia and there wouldn’t be a need for our kind of work.’’91

But HW’s job was not yet finished. As it turned out, former dissidents were fallibleand fledgling democracies were fragile. An HW document from 1992 bemoans theloss of old allies: ‘‘Many of the dissidents with whom we formerly worked have goneinto the new governments. Some have turned out to have views antithetical to ourconcept of human rights. Almost no one is truly impartial.’’92 And the new govern-ments, having corrupted the old dissidents, were themselves in danger of destruction.According to the 1989 annual report,

In much of Eastern Europe there has been little or no experience with democracy.The new governments are fragile, sometimes compromised, and generally inexperi-enced. The security police may be operating secretly, autonomously. Thepossibility of a coup or a military takeover is always present. Beset by economicand social problems of great magnitude, by the resurgence of long-suppressedethnic hostilities and yearnings for independence, there is a danger that even thosegovernments with the best of intentions may succumb to pressures beyond theircontrol.93

The Soviet Union may have collapsed, but HW still had a role to play in assisting the‘‘new and needy independent states that to one extent or another want our blessingsand approval as they reaffirm their own uniqueness.’’94 HRW’s 1989 annual report

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pledged that ‘‘as before, Helsinki Watch will be there—to observe, to report and tohelp. The struggle for human rights in Eastern Europe is far from over. To thecontrary, it is just beginning.’’95 It was, however, still supposed to have an end. AnHW grant proposal from 1992 stated that ‘‘by training human rights monitors anddefenders throughout the region, Helsinki Watch will be contributing to the devel-opment of civil society as well as seeking to establish a system of citizen enforcementthat is intended to ensure that rights spelled out in newly adopted constitutions aremeaningful.’’96 HW’s mission would end as soon as it had helped produce an inde-pendent domestic human rights movement: ‘‘We would not attempt to organize thesegroups into any formal federation. Nor do we see our role as permanent. This will bea limited project: as the local activists develop expertise, they will take over the trainingsessions and we will withdraw. Our plan is to operate over a three-to-five-year periodafter which our work will be continued by the people we have trained.’’97

This approach followed the logic dictated by the original Helsinki interpretationof the organization’s mandate. External interference had to be justified within aframework that presupposed the primacy of national rights defenders. Ideally, humanrights would be guaranteed by civil rights, and all states would become like the UnitedStates. HW’s mission in Eastern Europe, then, would be to help create stable and self-sufficient democracies according to the American model. In the foreword to the 1989

annual report, Bernstein wrote,

That is why this is such an important moment for human rights in the UnitedStates. We Americans are proud of our institutions—our hospitals, our univer-sities, our museums, our cultural groups—and we are generous in supportingthem. But somehow we do not realize that our greatest institution is our ideas,the human rights ideas embedded in our constitution, and that this is the momentwhen we must persuade others to devise ways to protect ideas in their own socie-ties.98

From the first year of its existence, Helsinki Watch had been guided by the principlethat citizens of certain states were justified in intervening in the affairs of others in thename of higher values they were all supposed to share. ‘‘The human rights embeddedin [the American] constitution’’ gave HW reason to defend Eastern Europe’s dissi-dents and train its would-be activists. Implicit in this logic was the idea thatinternational human rights work was necessitated by specific conditions—that it hada center and a periphery, an agent and a patient, a beginning and an end. In otherwords, HW’s limited international scope was supposed to be the temporary productof particular political and historical circumstances.

In its 1990 World Report, HRW announced that it would cease reporting onCzechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland because ‘‘by and large we consider that theyhave changed to a point where domestic efforts to protect human rights no longerrequire support through the sustained external campaigns that are our modusoperandi.’’99 But by 1993 HRW had resumed work in the Czech Republic, Slovakia,and Hungary, and no similar announcements of domestic self-sufficiency were madeelsewhere. The organization’s scope had become global and its mission had becomeopen-ended. In this context, the monitors it trained in Eastern Europe were simply a

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necessary component of an international human rights movement that the organi-zation itself would oversee. Though only a few would work directly for HRW, therest would fulfill a vital role in the organization’s efforts to monitor human rightsworldwide: ‘‘Because our work depends on the existence of reliable human rightssources within each country, we have been forced to seek out, encourage and trainnew people who have the potential of becoming human rights monitors within theircountries.’’100

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the organization’s self-perceptionwas still shaped, to some extent, by the logic of the Helsinki framework of nationalmonitoring committees. As the years passed, however, the importance of this modeldeclined, and the organization embraced a more universalist mandate. Nevertheless,echoes of a previous perspective persisted. As recently as 2009, Robert Bernstein wrotean op-ed in the New York Times that publicly condemned the organization he hadfounded for abandoning its ‘‘original mission’’ and disregarding the distinctionbetween open and closed societies:

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years andnow founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: Imust publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its originalmission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and supportdissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict thatare helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societieshave faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correctthem—through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mech-anisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic andnondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wantedto prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalencegame with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissi-dents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag—andthe millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 coun-tries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasingfrequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The regionis populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet inrecent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israelfor violations of international law than of any other country in the region.101

Bernstein’s distinction between ‘‘open’’ and ‘‘closed’’ societies reflected an ‘‘originalmission’’ that had, by that time, lost much of its relevance. For an organization thathad come to stand for human rights in general, any attempt to limit its purview waspotentially problematic. From the moment the organization decided to respond toReagan’s particularism by seeking to prove the universality of its own principles, itheaded down a path of continually expanding the scope of its monitoring activities.

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It started documenting abuses committed by ‘‘the right’’ in order to balance its moni-toring of ‘‘the left’’; it added humanitarian law to traditional human rights law; itbegan issuing reports on ‘‘open’’ societies despite Bernstein’s concerns and expandedits mandate to include social and cultural rights over Neier’s objections.102 In thesecases and others, strategic, moral, and legal arguments could be made for and againstan expansion of the organization’s monitoring scope. But the fact that HRW’s mainfocus had become the protection of universal human rights, as opposed to the defenseof a particular subset of humans, clearly favored one path over the other in the longrun.

HRW’s evolving mandate affected its relationship with its American base. Theorganization was founded explicitly as an American Helsinki Watch made up of ‘‘U.S.opinion leaders.’’103 Because they came from an ‘‘open society’’ known for its‘‘tradition of independent political activism,’’ they were justified in supporting theircolleagues in countries ‘‘where independent civil rights groups [were] suppressed andremedies [were] seldom available.’’104 The subsequent establishment of AmericasWatch lessened the importance of the national committee model, but the organiza-tion’s relationship to the U.S. government was central to its growing influence. AWwas an American organization that benefited from conflict with a superpower whosefundamental values it shared: its fight against Reagan served to raise its profile, allowedit to demonstrate Cold War neutrality, and provided it with a degree of foreign policyleverage.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the organization contributed significantlyto the institutionalization of a worldwide human rights regime. But this period ofpromise soon faded as the states responsible for the implementation of this systembegan to pull their support, the United States foremost among them. Just as HRWwas trying to transcend its American connection in favor of a truly transnationalposition, the American origins that had made its growth possible became a source ofvulnerability. Given time and money, HRW may overcome this difficulty. The orga-nization has worked hard to diversify its funding and membership and does a carefuljob of grounding its work in international law. But the challenges implicit in theorganization’s original bifurcation remain. What will it take for HRW ‘‘to be seen asmore international, less an American organization’’? And what are the ultimate conse-quences of transforming the pursuit of impartiality and universality into an end in itsown right?

N O T E S

I would like to thank Michael Geyer and Joachim Haeberlen for their help in shaping this

essay and Michael Bradley, Samuel Moyn, Benjamin Nathans, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann for

their thoughtful comments and suggestions, as well as Edward Kline and Catherine Fitzpatrick for

sharing their memories and expertise.

1. Stephanie Strom, ‘‘George Soros to Donate $100 Million to Human Rights Watch,’’ New

York Times, September 7, 2010. HRW’s critics seem to agree with its most important supporter.

In a May 12, 2014 open letter to HRW’s executive director, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Adolfo

Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, along with more than one hundred others, charged the

organization with maintaining ‘‘close ties to the U.S. government’’ that ‘‘call into question its

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independence.’’ They did not, however, question HRW’s internationalist mandate or the universal

applicability of its principles. Champions and critics of HRW may differ in their evaluation of its

current moral standing and effectiveness, but their understanding of its goals seems to be more or

less the same.

2. Kenneth Roth, in discussion with the author, August 11, 2010.

3. The Fund for Free Expression, HW’s parent organization, received a six-month, $25,000

planning period grant from the Ford Foundation in July 1978, followed by a two-year, $400,000

grant in January 1979. For a more detailed discussion of the Ford Foundation’s involvement in the

founding of Helsinki Watch, see William Korey, Taking on the World’s Repressive Regimes: The Ford

Foundation’s International Human Rights Policies and Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2007).

4. See in particular Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A

Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), for

an in-depth account of HW’s place within the larger context of Helsinki activism. See also William

Korey, The Promises We Keep: Human Rights, the Helsinki Process and American Foreign Policy (New

York: St. Martin’s, 1994); Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights,

and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Christian

Peterson, Globalizing Human Rights: Private Citizens, the Soviet Union, and the West (London:

Routledge, 2011). For a more specific focus on the role of the European Community, see Angela

Romano, From Detente in Europe to European Detente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki CSCE

(Brussels: Lang, 2009). For an account of the rise of human rights in the Soviet Union, see Paul

Goldberg, The Final Act: The Dramatic, Revealing Story of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group (New

York: William Morrow, 1988); and Benjamin Nathans, ‘‘Alexander Volpin and the Origins of the

Soviet Human Rights Movement’’ (working paper, NCEEER, 2006). For a more general back-

ground, see Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2012); Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights

Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Stefan-Ludwig

Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2011); and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2010).

5. For a particularly good example of this type of narrowly focused study of a single organi-

zation and the evolution of its mandate, see Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding

Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

6. Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

2013).

7. N.A., ‘‘Appendix: Extract from the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooper-

ation in Europe,’’ in Human Rights and American Foreign Policy, ed. Donald P. Kommers and

Gilburt D. Loescher (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 145–46. Also see

the electronic copy of the Helsinki Final Act, accessed December 9, 2013, http://www.hri.org/docs/

Helsinki75.html.

8. Thomas, Helsinki Effect, 94.

9. Ibid., 121; Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, 32–33.

10. Benjamin Nathans, ‘‘Alexander Volpin.’’

11. Edward Kline, in discussion with the author, April 30, 2014.

12. Goldberg, Final Act, 45.

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13. Moscow Helsinki Group, ‘‘Ob obrazovanii obshchestvennoi gruppy sodeistviia vypol-

neniiu Khel’sinkskikh soglashenii v SSSR, Moskovsksia khel’sinksksia gruppa,’’ accessed March

29, 2011, http://www.mhg.ru/history/14454FE.

14. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘The First Fifteen Months: A Summary of the Activities

of the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee from its founding in February, 1979, through April, 1980,’’

Human Rights Watch Records: Helsinki Watch, 1952–2003 [Bulk Dates: 1978–1994], Columbia

University Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter HRWR), Series VIII: New York

Office Files, 1975–1996, box 1, folder 1–14: Annual Report, 1979–1993, 3.

15. Snyder, Human Rights Activism, 40.

16. Ibid., 41. The quotation is from Sarah Snyder’s interview with Yuri Orlov on March

27–28, 2008.

17. Henry Kissinger, as cited in Moyn, Last Utopia, 150; for a more in-depth discussion of the

creation of the Helsinki Commission, see Snyder, Human Rights Activism, 38–52.

18. Jimmy Carter, ‘‘Inaugural Address,’’ in Burton Kaufman, Presidential Profiles: The Carter

Years (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 552.


20. For more on the Belgrade Follow-up Meeting and Jimmy Carter’s turn to human rights,

see Snyder, Human Rights Activism, 81–114; and Peterson, Globalizing Human Rights, 45–65.

21. Alfred Friendly Jr., ‘‘Proposed Agenda for the Committee on Human Rights and Funda-

mental Freedoms,’’ March 14, 1979, HRWR, Series VIII: New York Office Files, 1975–1996, box

1, folder 18: Hearings, 1978–1979, 3.


23. Korey, Repressive Regimes, 97–98.

24. Ibid., 102, 108.

25. Friendly, ‘‘Proposed Agenda,’’ 3.

26. Ibid., 1.

27. The Fund for Free Expression, ‘‘Request for a Planning Grant to Establish a U.S. Helsinki

Watch Committee to be Administered by the Fund for Free Expression, Inc.,’’ 3, personal archive

of Edward Kline.

28. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘First Fifteen Months,’’ 3; U.S. Helsinki Watch

Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report: A Summary of the Activities of the U.S. Helsinki Watch

Committee from February, 1980, through January, 1981,’’ HRWR, Series VIII: New York Office

Files, 1975–1996, box 1, folder 1–14: Annual Report, 1979–1993, 1–2.


30. Robert Bernstein and Orville Schell, ‘‘New York Times, Op Ed Page, March 7, 1979,’’

HRWR, Series I, box 51, folder 17; U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘First Fifteen Months,’’ 4;

U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report,’’ 2; ‘‘Helsinki monitors: First mailing

(establishment of HW), 1979,’’ HRWR, Series I, box 51, folder 12, 2.

31. ‘‘Joint Statement of the Moscow and American Helsinki Watch Groups, 1979,’’ HRWR,

Series I, box 53, folder 8.

32. David Heaps, ‘‘Response to Al Friendly, Jr.,’’ March 26, 1979, HRWR, Series VIII, box

1, folder 18: Hearings, 1978–1979, 2.

33. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘First Fifteen Months,’’ 3.

34. The Fund for Free Expression, ‘‘Request for a Planning Grant,’’ 2.


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36. Ibid., 8 (emphasis original).

37. Marvin Frankel, ‘‘Letter to David Fishlow Concerning Friendly’s Paper,’’ April 10, 1979,

HRWR, Series VIII, box 1, folder 18, 2.


39. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report,’’ 11; Stephen Whitfield, letter

to the editor, March 5, 1979, as quoted in Bernstein and Schell, ‘‘Op Ed Page.’’

40. Jeri Laber, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2010.

41. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report,’’ 11.

42. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘First Fifteen Months,’’ 3–4.

43. Aryeh Neier, Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights (New York: Public

Affairs, 2003), 149.

44. Laber, Courage of Strangers, 35, 98, 75.

45. Korey, Repressive Regimes, 105. In her memoir, Jeri Laber claims that Fishlow left the

organization voluntarily, but a 1980 Ford Foundation memo discovered by Korey states that ‘‘Bern-

stein hired a Committee staff director before functions and objectives were defined. This proved

harmful because he was a specialist on American minority problems whereas the Committee subse-

quently developed largely along international lines. As a result, conflict arose and the director was

fired several months after he began work.’’

46. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report.’’

47. Bernstein and Schell, ‘‘Op Ed Page.’’

48. Arthur Goldberg, ‘‘Testimony and statement (before Democratic Platform Committee),

1980,’’ HRWR, Series I: Jeri Laber Files, box 54, folder 5, 1.

49. Ibid.

50. Bernstein and Schell, ‘‘Op Ed Page’’ (emphasis original); Edward Kline, ‘‘Committee on

Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,’’ HRWR, Series VIII, box 1, folder 18.

51. ‘‘First mailing,’’ 2.

52. Moskovskaya Helsinskaya Gruppa, ‘‘English Language Page,’’ accessed July 30, 2012,

http://www.mhg.ru/english/18E49C2. By 1979, seven of the ten founding members of the Moscow

Helsinki Group had been arrested or forced to emigrate. In September 1982, the group’s dissolution

was finally announced.

53. ‘‘Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.’’


55. Goldberg, ‘‘Testimony and statement,’’ 2.

56. Jimmy Carter, ‘‘Inaugural Address,’’ in Kaufman, Carter Years, 552.

57. Ibid., 553.

58. Ibid.

59. ‘‘Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.’’

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Laber, Courage of Strangers, 103.

63. Ibid., 128.

64. Ronald Reagan, ‘‘The Evil Empire,’’ in Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches,

1900–1999, ed. Stephen E. Lucas and Martin J. Medhurst (New York: Oxford University Press,

2009), 559.

65. Americas Watch Committee, The First Year (New York: The Committee, 1982), 1–2.

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67. Americas Watch, First Year, 1.

68. The Ford Foundation provided $180,000 to the Fund for Free Expression to help establish

Americas Watch and ‘‘create an influential constituency for the Latin American human rights

movements in the United States.’’ The Foundation also supported the turn away from an exclusive

focus on Eastern Europe in order to avoid ‘‘the danger of [human rights] being submerged within

‘cold war’ politics.’’ As quoted in Korey, Repressive Regimes, 83.

69. Neier, Taking Liberties, 153.

70. Ibid., 166.

71. Ibid., 198.

72. Ibid., 194.

73. Ibid., 169.

74. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Third Annual Report: A Summary of the Activities of

the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee from February, 1981, through January, 1982,’’ HRWR, Series

VIII: New York Office Files, 1975–1996, box 1, folder 1–14: Annual Report, 1979–1993, 12.


76. Ibid.

77. Neier, Taking Liberties, 194; and Laber, Courage of Strangers, 168.


79. Ibid., 175.

80. ‘‘IHF Press Release, 1983,’’ HRWR, Series X: International Helsinki Federation for

Human Rights Files, 1975–1996, box 3, folder 5, 2.


82. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Third Annual Report,’’ 20.

83. ‘‘IHF Press Release,’’ 2, ‘‘Press Release,’’ in ‘‘Bellagio Conference Report, 1982,’’ HRWR,

Series X, box 2, folder 6, 45.

84. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Third Annual Report,’’ 18–19.

85. Moscow Helsinki Group, ‘‘Ob obrazovanii obshchestvennoi’’; ‘‘IHF Press Release.’’

86. Laber, Courage of Strangers, 240 (emphasis original).

87. International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, accessed March 29, 2011, http://

www.ihf-hr.org.

88. Jeri Laber, in discussion with the author, August 10, 2010.

89. Neier, Taking Liberties, 160.

90. Helsinki Watch, ‘‘Annual Report 1988,’’ HRWR, Series VIII, box 1, folder 1–14, 18–19, i.

91. Rachel Denber, in discussion with the author, August 24, 2010.

92. ‘‘Overview of HW’s Activities and Concerns, 1992,’’ HRWR, 5.

93. Human Rights Watch, ‘‘Introduction to the Work of Helsinki Watch,’’ in Human Rights

Watch World Report 1989, accessed March 29, 2011, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1989/

WR89/Helsinki.htm.

94. ‘‘Overview of HW’s Activities and Concerns, 1992,’’ HRWR, Series VIII: New York

Office Files, 1975–1996, box 30, folder 3, 1.

95. Human Rights Watch, ‘‘Introduction to the Work of Helsinki Watch.’’

96. ‘‘Expand Helsinki Watch activities, 1991–1992,’’ HRWR, Series I: Jeri Laber Files, box 54,

folder 1, 2.

97. Ibid., 12–13.

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98. Human Rights Watch, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Human Rights Watch World Report 1989, accessed

March 29, 2011, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1989/WR89/Foreword.htm.

99. Human Rights Watch, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Human Rights Watch World Report 1990,

accessed May 3, 2014, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1990/WR90/INTRO.BOU.htm.

100. ‘‘Overview of HW’s Activities and Concerns, 1992,’’ 5.

101. Robert Bernstein, ‘‘Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,’’ New York Times, October 19,

2009.

102. Kenneth Roth, in discussion with the author, August 11, 2010.


104. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, ‘‘Second Annual Report,’’ 11; Bernstein and Schell,

‘‘Op Ed Page.’’

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